Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Poetry and Art
SABCL - Volume 27
Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Metrical Experiments in Bengali
New Metres in Bengali [1]
Of course, Prabodh
Sen is right. I suppose what Buddhadev means is that none of the very great
poets invented a metre — they were all too lazy and preferred stealing other
people’s rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole
all his plots from wherever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same,
if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho,
Catallus, Horace? they did a good deal of inventing or of transferring —
introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can’t spot a precedent in
modern European literature, but there must be some. And after all, hang
precedents! A good thing — I mean, combining metric invention with perfect
poetry — would be still a good thing to do, even if no one had had the good
sense to do it before.
4 November 1932